Are you thinking about submitting an abstract for this year's AASHE conference but haven't quite made up your mind? Here are 10 reasons that you should join us in Nashville:

1. Your ideas will be shared and discussed on the largest stage for higher education sustainability thought leadership in North America. A great opportunity for your campus and your own professional development.

2. You will be one of the first presenters (ever!) in the new Music City Center, on track to achieve LEED Silver certification.

3. You will have a rock-solid excuse to visit Nashville. Reward yourself after your presentation with some live music or Southern-style cuisine like you've never had before.

Whether your college is striving to reach its carbon-reduction goals or is considering divesting from fossil fuel companies, green revolving funds (GRFs) offer a compelling investment opportunity. With a median annual return (ROI) of 28 percent, GRFs are transforming campus energy efficiency improvements from perceived expenses to high-return investments. One of many GRF examples documented in Greening the Bottom Line 2012 is a project at George Washington University. GW is generating $100,000 per year in savings since investing $141,000 in 2010 to upgrade the lighting in their academic center. This project has already more than paid for itself and, over its projected eight-year lifespan, the original $141,000 investment will realize at least $800,000 in total savings (even more, if energy prices rise).

As we connect the dots from ancient history to the distant future, we envision and hope for a clean and safe future for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. Sustainability professionals work diligently so that our posterity will look back at these days of the early 21st century and be pleased that their ancestors had wisdom, courage, tenacity, and imagination to overcome the huge obstacles of fast speeding and hard charging climate disruption. By honoring the ancient wisdom of our ancestors and working to protect the future occupants of our planet, our strong actions and passion may stand the tests of time. Although net-zero energy buildings currently represent a minuscule percentage of our nation’s infrastructure, they represent a hope for our descendants.

In part 1 of this post, I examined current practices for identifying sustainability courses and found that definitions of sustainability-focused and -related courses tend to leave too much room for interpretation. As a result, institutions are taking widely varying approaches to course classification and there is a huge range in scores earned on the two credits in STARS that focus on courses (ER Credits 6 and 7). Based on these findings, I argued that more guidance in STARS was necessary. In this post, I’ll make some suggestions for what this guidance should look like.

In an effort to track progress in sustainability education and promote sustainability courses, many colleges and universities have attempted to identify which courses they offer integrate sustainability concepts. As Alfred State is starting to move in this direction, I recently analyzed almost 160 definitions of “sustainability in the curriculum” submitted by participants in the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS). To enhance the comparability over time and with other institutions, I was hoping to find examples of definitions that are clear, specific, and require little subjective interpretation. At a minimum, I was looking for definitions that were explicit in how to deal with potential grey areas.

Resilience is not the successor of sustainability; it is a sustainability synergizer. It can make sustainability work better.

How? First, resilience is people-facing. Perfect. That is sustainability’s soft spot. Allying with people-focused efforts heals sustainability’s historic hurt: a paucity of explicit social justice mechanisms. Thus by folding in resilience techniques we make sustainability better. By focusing our campuses on adapting to the new climate realities, we make our campuses better. This means we work on adaptation plans that include disaster planning not just low flow toilets. It means we talk to our leadership about investments in durable assets like renewables that are immune from impending resource shortages—and pay better anyway. It means integrating skills-based content into sustainability curriculum such as learning to weatherize low-income homes in local neighborhoods to build resilience-- and sustainability--in our communities.

Resilience is not the antidote to sustainability; it’s an additive.

While the stories above can be seen as portals into sustainability progress on our campuses, the stories under the affordability & access and diversity & inclusion categories continue to read as outliers in on-the-ground sustainability efforts at our campuses. We are often unable to connect these social justice initiatives at our institutions with existing sustainability efforts, beyond reading about them in the Bulletin. We inherently know that the inclusion of justice is essential and we undoubtedly desire just, equitable, high performing, innovative, environmentally responsible and efficient institutions. Yet more than a decade into the field we are hard pressed to find an example of a campus sustainability plan that includes a commitment to ‘need-based’ education (though the institutions committed to this are growing in number) or conversely, a need-based tuition plan that calls for ‘sustainability.’

In reflecting on this point, I return to the work of Julian Agyeman who points out: “Research has shown that, globally, nations with a greater commitment to equity and a correspondingly more equitable society tend to also have a greater commitment to environmental quality.” What will it take for this to be said of our universities? What will it take for these stories to become portals into a comprehensive sustainability plan for our campuses?

While the stories above can be seen as portals into sustainability progress on our campuses, the stories under the affordability & access and diversity & inclusion categories continue to read as outliers in on-the-ground sustainability efforts at our campuses. We are often unable to connect these social justice initiatives at our institutions with existing sustainability efforts, beyond reading about them in the Bulletin. We inherently know that the inclusion of justice is essential and we undoubtedly desire just, equitable, high performing, innovative, environmentally responsible and efficient institutions. Yet more than a decade into the field we are hard pressed to find an example of a campus sustainability plan that includes a commitment to ‘need-based’ education (though the institutions committed to this are growing in number) or conversely, a need-based tuition plan that calls for ‘sustainability.’

In reflecting on this point, I return to the work of Julian Agyeman who points out: “Research has shown that, globally, nations with a greater commitment to equity and a correspondingly more equitable society tend to also have a greater commitment to environmental quality.” What will it take for this to be said of our universities? What will it take for these stories to become portals into a comprehensive sustainability plan for our campuses?